“Every year that we study threat actions leading to data breaches, the story is the same; most victims aren’t overpowered by unknowable and unstoppable attacks. For the most part, we know them well enough and we also know how to stop them.”

And here’s the same thing in different wording:

“The latest round of evidence leads us to the same conclusion as before: your security woes are not caused by the lack of something new. They almost surely have more to do with not using, under using, or misusing something old.”

And of course, I like this one because it highlights Automated Vulnerability Assessment:

“SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, authentication bypass, and exploitation of session variables contributed to nearly half of breaches attributed to hacking or network intrusion. It is no secret that attackers are moving up the stack and targeting the application layer. Why don’t our defenses follow suit? As with everything else, put out the fires first: even lightweight web application scanning and testing would have found many of the problems that led to major breaches in the past year.”

Basically, your organization already has the security solution that it needs; you’re just not using it.

For years, Gartner has been recommending VA/VM as the effective way to prevent successful attacks, only they’ve been a bit too low key about it in my opinion. Of course as a VA vendor I’m not even going to pretend to be objective here, but I always wondered if the fact most leading vendors are relatively small made Gartner pay less attention to the field.

ZDNet has a nice piece on why cheap GPU’s are making strong passwords useless. They are right, of course (though it’s pretty much been that way for 20 years, since the need for /etc/shadow) but they missing the obvious solution to the problem.

The solution is not to make passwords more complex. It’s making them less complex (so that users can actually remember them) and making sure brute force is impossible. We know how to do that, we just have to overcome a generation-old axiom about trivial passwords being easy to break (they are not, if you only get very few tries).